How It’s Actually Made: 53 Products People Would Stop Buying If They Knew What’s Behind Them

Junduk said:
After I found out the story behind the palm plantations for the production of palm oil I made it my personal mission to completely throw it out of my life.

delayedregistration replied:
"Palm oil is the biggest reason for massive deforestation around the world. South America and Southeast Asia (Indonesia in particular) are producing the most. There are moratoriums on new palm oil plantations, but companies are skirting that issue by paying individuals to start forest fires so that the companies can then buy up the land that is no longer a forest. Deforestation is destroying habitats for animals like orangutans and tigers. And all of the burnings of the forest are also burning peat. Peat is essentially forest detritus that house huge amounts of C02. By burning it we are quickly releasing all of that C02 into the atmosphere. Worst of all, the plantations are only good for one or two cycles, then the land is essentially discarded, and new plantations are made. In my opinion, palm oil production is the greatest ecological disaster in history. It is nearly everything, and essentially impossible to avoid. There are so many different names for it, so it can go unnoticed so easily. Even the supposedly sustainable palm oil production is extremely damaging to the environment it is grown in."

promise_me_jetpacks said:
"Fast fashion. Even a conservative estimate puts that industry as the 5th biggest polluter, globally. Just stop it."

XxsquirrelxX replied:
"Fashion is honestly one of the worst industries out there, up there with electronics and industrial farming. But unlike those other two, we don’t really need it at the scale it’s at right now. Pollution is just the tip of the iceberg, the part we can see and are personally impacted by. What we don’t see is the child labor used to make it, the subtly injected unhealthy body standards in the advertising, the animal abuse for fur when synthetic fur is no different and actually cheaper, and just how much the consumer is influenced to overconsume. I mean who in their right mind would really care about the difference between fall fashion and winter fashion if the advertising didn’t tell us we needed to buy it to make people like us?"

gonewithfire said:
"Foie Gras."

Sirnando138 replied:
"As a young cook, I worked a few weeks at a farm that belonged to a friend of the chef I was working for. They wanted me to help with all the things to gain a larger respect for the many items we served at our place. Had to kill a few animals while there. Pigs and several fowl. Those were sad to do. One day, I had to work the pump on the ducks and geese being raised for foie. What a strange and emotional experience. I felt bad for them. A few of them didn’t mind it too much but most had to be restrained. It was the worst job I had to do there."

throwawayannon8675 said:
"People always point at Apple for exploiting Chinese labor but don’t realize that pretty much every company does the same thing and most of them use the exact same factory as Apple. It’s called “Foxconn” not “Apple”. They make everything."

XxsquirrelxX replied:
"Foxconn literally built nets around their factories because workers kept jumping off the roofs. Yeah, a suicide net around a factory. You know conditions are bad when people would rather die than work there."

"The batteries for electric cars. Approximately 70% of the world’s cobalt is mined by children in the Congo, and cobalt is a vital ingredient in electric car batteries. However, companies like Tesla are attempting to find a way to make batteries without cobalt, but no solutions have been found yet."

"Not really a product but if people knew how much and often people cut corners in construction, I think housing prices would go wayyyy down. I don't think I was ever on a job where a problem came up, and people were like, "Okay, let's start over and do this right." Or, especially in bigger construction companies, how much time the employees waste running the clock.

Edit: Guys trust me when I say I have put my sweat and blood into the industry. My hands are callused. I'm still working class and it wasn't my intention to call out people that do this stuff as 'lazy' or whatever else. Most people doing these jobs are extremely underpaid, and on top of being underpaid, they're putting their bodies and health on the line every single day. I almost lost a finger, twice. I've almost had a whole granite slab fall on me for 11$/hr. I probably would've died. And many more situations I won't get into. Don't take it out on the workers. Just try your best to work with a smaller company that isn't working 50 jobs at once and has a supervisor/owner around to watch what's going on."

"I really don't think there is one. If it's because the ingredients or preparation are disgusting, I think most people are perfectly happy to keep eating/using it because the finished product is fine. If it's a moral reason, I just don't think most people would care enough to stop using or eating whatever the product is. We've known for years that Air Jordans are being made with child labor in sweatshops, and sales haven't dipped one bit due to that. And I don't say this as a cynic, I think we should work to improve conditions for all humanity, but the proportion of consumers who would be bothered enough to stop buying a thing is vanishingly small."

"Foam hand soap. It’s a quarter liquid soap and three-quarters water. It uses a special pump to turn it into foam. Very clever packaging. You're paying the same amount or more for a quarter of the amount of actual soap."

slashd said:
"Diamonds."

XxsquirrelxX replied:
"I remember seeing ads for chocolate diamonds. Do you know what chocolate diamonds used to be? The waste. An impure diamond that wasn’t considered fit for sale, until some evil genius at Kay HQ figured out that women are stereotyped as loving chocolate, so all they had to do was rebrand the garbage diamond as a “chocolate diamond” and jack that price way up. Hopefully one day we finally colonize that planet made entirely of diamonds so we can tell the diamond industry to go fu*k itself. Both the producer and the consumer get screwed. The whole industry is a scam built on our perceived need to give loved ones gifts so that they’ll love us."

"Jello is a meat product masquerading as dessert."

"Monster energy drinks. I have been to their bottling warehouse (I was in college with some guys who became chemists for them while I was working on my doctorate). Some defect in one of the machines caused a bunch of cans to leak. The wood pallets underneath disintegrated like wet paper. Further, the maintenance crew was on a cleaning rotation. They told me that the Monster tanks do not get cleaned unless there is so much buildup that it changes the taste. This is because it is so caustic that bacteria and mold don't survive."

"Phones. People would still buy phones, but probably demand that their phones be made from materials not mined by child slaves in the democratic republic of the Congo. The miners can be as young as four, get paid as little as a dime(in American value), and work 12 hours a day, all to mine the cobalt(60% of the global supply) that makes (batteries?). I don’t know all the facts, too lazy to read threw all the articles, but I’ve heard things from miners who refuse to work(including children) get limbs chopped off, to 24-hour shifts in deep dark tunnels. It’s a great way to hate the phone that you're probably holding while reading this."

"Dasani in the UK. Once people figured out it was just the same tap water just “purified” and resold to them they stopped buying it. Tom Scott has a great video on what happened."

"Tropical Fruit! After Spain ceded control of their territories in South America, the U.S. invaded several SA counties to secure access to the Panama Canal and farmland ripe for confiscation and sale to fruit companies. People were slaughtered, dictators propped up, railroads laid, and mangos exported. These Banana Wars were some of the most blatant acts of American Imperialism since Manifest Destiny. Many of these countries still haven't economically recovered (some tired but got coupled), and the Chiquita Bananas you buy today are grown on that legacy, still unseparated."

"Turkey bacon. It markets itself as a healthier bacon alternative but it is actually a horrifying extruded meat product. It's the hot dog of breakfast."

DudeGuyVR said:
"A lot of perfumes are made out of musk glands that come from deer. They are killed in order to get it and it’s not pleasant. Also, some vanilla flavoring uses a liquid that comes out from the base of a beaver's tail. It’s not a pleasant experience for them either."

TheWaystone replied:
"Those products are extraordinarily expensive, both castorum and ambergris (you could call it whale vomit), are used in high-end perfumes. Trust me, that bottle of Axe that's been in your bathroom contains no natural ingredients. Musk deer are what musk comes from - if you've ever heard a scent described as musky, it's thanks to them. Almost no musk deer are used for producing musky scents any longer (frankly artificial versions are just as good), they seem to most often be killed for traditional medicines use."

"Fish sauce. The base for many many Thai dishes. Fish is fermented for 6 months with salt until it breaks down into a thick slurry. It is then strained in the sun and after that stored in containers for years. But you know what, it is delicious and I'm eating it forever."

"Viscose. I wanted to make myself a viscose dress and thought it was a good idea because it's cotton and it must be as eco-friendly as possible. Turned out viscose production creates tons of waste and is really, really bad for the environment. Needless to say, I'm choosing another fabric."

"Anyone who enjoys sausage and respects the law should never find out how either is made."

"Pickles. I am a forklift mechanic and one of our clients is Mrs. Klein’s pickles. They use giant outside vats for pickling and NONE of the vats have any sort of covering on top. Open to the elements. In the Arizona heat. One time when I was on a service call out there I decided to walk up onto the little catwalk where the workers go up to stir the mixture. When I looked in the first one I saw a dead cat(100% ferel), multiple dead rats, and more bugs than I could possibly count. About threw up right there. To this day I haven’t eaten a single pickle and I will DEFINITELY not be eating Mrs. Klein’s product ever again."